BayCEER Workshop 2025

Rethinking analytic approaches in community ecology

Keynote in Ecology and Biodiversity Patterns

09.10.2025, 09:15-10:00, H 36

Community ecology seeks to understand complex patterns of species' co-occurrence, but traditional methods often produce unreliable results. Commonly used methods, such as NMDS and PCA, univariate regression models, rarefaction curves, clustering methods, and diversity indices (Shannon's, Simpson's indices) have well-known limitations and provide little guarantee for accurate ecological answers. Despite a large body of literature on these limitations, many community ecologists remain reliant on these established methods, limiting the adoption of more flexible and reliable, model-based approaches that perform better.

My research focuses on developing robust statistical approaches, creating user-friendly software, and making the approaches accessible to ecologists. In this presentation I give an overview of my work so far, and share some ideas for a future project proposal with the German research council.

Keywords: statistics, multivariate, ordination, community ecology

Export as iCal: